After a flurry of war and protests, Iran’s Ayatollah and his guards falters
The bloody crackdown offers hints about growing tensions inside the country’s ruling system as the cleric’s rule comes under strain.
The country’s top generals stood in their socks at the entrance of a mosque in northern Tehran, mourning the men who had been killed in the strikes and would now replace, weeks after Israeli warplanes pounded Iran’s capital in June.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the feared praetorian guard of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was wiped out by the strikes, which had dealt the country’s military its biggest single blow in decades.
Now, the question was how would this new generation of leaders, catapulted to the top, would guide the country through a singularly challenging period, including growing economic stress, the prospect of new international sanctions and regular threats of yet more military strikes from President Trump and Israel.
The answer came in recent weeks when those new leaders opened fire on unarmed protesters and massacred thousands of people as they responded to nationwide protests with breathtaking brutality. During the protests that lasted from December 28 to mid-January, at least one Iranian human rights group based in the United States stated that it had confirmed 5,002 deaths, including 207 members of the security forces.
On Wednesday, the Iranian authorities reported 3,117 deaths in their first official toll. The bloody crackdown seemed to show that Iran’s ruling system, which is led by the ayatollah and the Revolutionary Guards, a group of about 150,000 people, was united and willing to do anything for its survival.
But Iran experts said the bloody response was also a sign of the system’s growing weakness, exposing the limits of Ayatollah Khamenei’s 37-year rule as he wrestles with surging domestic unrest and intense foreign pressure at the same time.
Mr. on Thursday Trump stated that although he wished he would not have to use it, an American “armada” was heading toward Iran. He urged the Iranian government once more not to relaunch its nuclear program or kill protesters.
According to Afshon Ostovar, an expert on Iran at the Naval Postgraduate School in California and the author of “Vanguard of the Imam,” a history of the Revolutionary Guards, that combination of factors puts the ruling system under tremendous strain. He stated, “They saw the protests as an existential threat right off the bat.” “They turned to live fire really quickly because their weakness was acute, and they knew it.”
The Revolutionary Guards are establishing themselves as the foundation of the system as the ayatollah’s legitimacy is openly questioned. “You have this aging theocrat whose days are numbered,” Mr. Ostovar stated “And you have security forces that are taking an increasingly aggressive response to any threat to the regime.”
The turmoil has rekindled comparisons between the Islamic Republic and the Soviet Union before it fell apart in the 1980s. Iran has seldom faced a greater array of challenges. Its network of regional proxies, including Hezbollah and Hamas, is in tatters. Its controversial nuclear program, which is estimated to have cost tens of billions of dollars, did not work to deter other countries.
Supplies of water and electricity are running low. Openly flouted edicts require Iranian women to wear head scarves, a symbol of the ayatollah’s conservative rule. “The regime is ideologically bankrupt, economically at a dead end, and unable to rescue itself,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, a research body. “But it still has the will, and a fearsome capacity for repression.”
Criticism asserts that the Islamic Republic has been led into this predicament by the ayatollah, who made a promise to strengthen it when he took power in 1989. One of the pillars of his iron rule was his intransigence, which was rooted in opposition to Israel and the United States as well as domestic change.
However, that strategy is viewed as a sign of vulnerability by some, including some of his own supporters, and analysts claim that his authority is at its lowest level in decades. Iranians of all political stripes came together to oppose foreign aggression after American and Israeli airstrikes in June started a nationalist upsurge.
As he left the mosque in northern Tehran last summer, retired Revolutionary Guards commander Abdulkarim Alizadeh stated, “All these stupid attacks by the Zionists have brought Iranians together.” Iran’s enemies had “miscalculated” if they hoped the attacks would provoke a popular uprising, Kamal Kharazi, a senior adviser to the supreme leader, told The New York Times in July. He countered, “On the contrary, the war led to national unity.” “We are prepared for all scenarios,” he added.
However, as the United Nations imposed new sanctions on Iran, which led to the collapse of the national currency, defiance soon gave way to economic reality. On December 28, protests quickly spread across the country in Tehran’s main bazaars, where merchants played a crucial role in the 1979 revolution.
The Revolutionary Guards have been quietly taking over from the 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei for years. They are more than just a security colossus. They control a media empire, large parts of the economy, oil exports, seaports, an intelligence agency and an air force.
“They have everything that it takes to assume power,” Mr. Vaez stated One scenario is that a figure favored by the Revolutionary Guards would seize power after the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, transforming Iran from a theocracy to a military-dominated country like Pakistan or Egypt.
Another possibility is for a section of the Revolutionary Guards to oppose him first out of fear of American-backed regime change. “A few years ago, a military coup was unthinkable,” Mr. “It’s becoming increasingly likely now because of all the pressures building on the regime,” Ostovar stated. The picture is further complicated by the generational divide inside the Revolutionary Guards, he said.
Younger officers rose through the ranks during a time of Iranian expansion as its influence spread through Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, while the older generation came of age during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, which was a time of deprivation and hardship. He stated that among younger Revolutionary Guards members, a more assertive faction has emerged, dismayed by the loss of that foreign network over the past few years and the severe damage to Iran’s nuclear program caused by the 12-day war in June.
The younger generation of Revolutionary Guards, on the other hand, has yet to experience much of that wealth and wants to safeguard what it perceives as its rightful reward, whereas an older group of Guards has become wealthy with children attending elite private schools, luxury homes, and automobiles. According to Mr., “They know that if the regime goes, they will lose their meal ticket and be first in line for retribution.” Ostovar stated Although it is difficult to predict Iran’s future course, it has been compared to Russia, Turkey, North Korea, and Egypt.
Still, predictions are uncertain because the country has been under a veil of fear and the internet has been restricted in recent weeks, making information particularly scarce. Iran’s government has survived at least four earlier waves of protest, many of which also stirred speculation of regime change, while the ayatollah has defied rumors that he was dying of cancer or was in poor health.
However, the majority of analysts concur that the pressure on Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards is likely to continue. Mr. stated, “This is not a sustainable situation in which you wait for an elderly leader to die to restore order.” Vaez, drawing comparisons with the last years of Mao Zedong in China, or Leonid I. Brezhnev throughout the Soviet Union. “The problem is the country doesn’t have time to wait him out,” says Iran.
